With Animal Crossing: New Horizons, events are being added sporadically. Not every special occasion, like Halloween, was available in-game at launch. During the Six-Month Financial Results Briefing for Fiscal Year Ending March 2021 conference call, President Shuntaro Furukawa confirmed that even more in-game events are planned to encourage people to buy and keep returning to the game.
The confirmation came up during the Q&A portion of the conference call. Someone pointed to the Animal Crossing: New Horizons sales going down in the second quarter and asked how Nintendo planned to ensure the game continues to perform well even after launch. Furukawa then brought up the updates that would appear, which would include in-game events. As a reminder, the game already met its lifetime sales prediction by May 2020, not even two months after its March 2020 debut. Its last quarterly earnings results placed it at over 26 million copies sold.
Here’s Furukawa’s full response from the official English version of the report Nintendo shared.
The sales pace of Animal Crossing: New Horizons has eased compared to the period around its initial release, but among all our titles, this one continues to maintain high sales levels. As I mentioned in response to a previous question (Q7), this title is also driving Nintendo Switch hardware sales in Asian markets, which have relatively smaller sales numbers than the markets in Japan, the U.S. and Europe.
Going forward, we will continue to implement in-game events and would like to create a situation where consumers will keep enjoying the game for a long time. This will be the first year-end sales season for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and we hope even more people will take that opportunity to purchase the game.
The last Animal Crossing: New Horizons event added was Halloween in the September 30, 2020 patch. That also added farming to the series for the first time, in a way, as it let you buy pumpkins and grow them as a crafting resource. The next update will appear in November 2020. If it follows the trend set by past patches and games, it should add the Harvest Festival event to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available for the Nintendo Switch.
